


Dieu le veut

by breathedout



Series: Tumblr Prompts [3]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Coming of Age, Eleanor fumes alone after a storm, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Pre-Canon, and other losses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-04-20
Packaged: 2019-04-25 07:05:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14373489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: The storm blew itself out at last, just before dawn.





	Dieu le veut

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lbmisscharlie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/gifts).



> Written for @lbmisscharlie for a prompt on Tumblr from ages ago: "Eleanor-centric, Unexpected."

### Nassau, 1704

The storm blew itself out at last, just before dawn. She could hear the change, more than see it, from her hiding place beneath the table in the main room. No more howling. No more crashing. The lashing, clattering sheets of rain, which all night had battered at the roof and the tavern walls; which had torn at the roof-shakes and ripped the shutters off the windows, gave way to a steady thrum; and then to a dampening hush; and then, as Eleanor seethed still, staring up at the warped table-boards under a thin blanket, to the cautious song of a single yellowthroat. _Witchety-witchety-weeeee_ : filtering through the window and the table and the close tavern air. Eleanor shut her eyes tight, and then opened them. When she turned slowly onto her side, and crawled out from her hiding place—careful, silent, hands and knees—the sky through the window where the shutter had used to be showed a sky sullen and paling. All the colour rinsed out. 

On the benches and the table-tops the men slept. Other than the fort it was the solidest building on the island; they had always gathered thus, when the storms came. Eleanor remembered—three years ago, five, and six. It had seemed a game then. To be awakened, a night jacket wrapped about her shoulders, and marched sleepily, clutching her blankets, down to the ground floor to sit with the other children, while the winds raged. It had seemed— _special_ , then. Eleanor sat back on her heels: her hands in fists. The tavern air sour-tasting. Before her, Johanssen in his sleep snorted. Snuffled. Snored. 

She would go herself, then, she thought. If they didn't believe her, she would—even Mr. Scott slept on. There he lay, on a pallet by the door: he must have come down late. She padded past him; holding her breath; sucking in her stomach to squeeze through the gap between the corner of his pallet and the table where Captain Lansig lay, reeking of rum, turned on his side with his hat over the side of his face. She nudged the door just open enough to slide through the crack, into the lightening morning. 

It was always—confronting. The morning after such a storm. Even Eleanor, who knew what to expect if anyone did, felt her fury dip, and waver. From outside, looking back up at the tavern, she could see it'd lost the south-east corner of the roof, in addition to all those shutters; but other houses had blown right open. Some were levelled entirely: flattened, and dispersed. Later, she knew—she remembered—would come the stench of the bodies: animals, and men. She remembered seeing them, and smelling them, when she was just a babe: lifted up on someone's shoulders so she wouldn't have to toddle amongst the dead. And then, tangled up with all the storms of her childhood: that later day, when Eleanor'd stood square on the ground looking straight on at—at her, lying there, face-down in the mud which smeared her yellow dress and her slippers and her dark gold hair when a soldier turned her over with his boot last year last year last year.

But. There was none of that, now. Eleanor stood, and breathed. The only human body to be seen: on one patch of ground, indistinguishable from any other, a young whore sat cross-legged in the pre-dawn gloom, half-naked, her red hair plastered to her head, working a knife into the eye of a coconut. She looked up at Eleanor, as Eleanor passed; then looked back down without any sign of acknowledgement at all. Eleanor thought, with a strange sense of ill-fittingness in her own skin: _I must be nearly as old as she_. 

The storm-wreckage so obscured the boundaries of the road, that it was as if Eleanor walked through some flat, waterlogged wilderness of refuse. Her boots squelched over ripped-up planks; sand; a pair of mud-soaked blue trousers; a bag of meal split open and ground into the dirt; severed palm branches. That was fine, she thought. She didn't need a road. _Solomon's Cove_ , those men had said, the night before, clear as anything as the wind had torn at the tavern and Marina had served rum for double the going rate and Eleanor had crouched beneath the table. _De Graaf's men_ , they'd said, and _bullion_ and _as soon as it's safe to sail_. Eleanor had listened until she'd caught the gist and then run to report what she'd heard but _You're talking nonsense_ Mr. Scott had told her, with insulting gentleness. _De Graaf's dead; you are mistaken._ And then, turning to Faraday, standing sentry by the door: _Show her back to the main room, could you_ , looking away from Eleanor and back down at her father's desk. _I'm just in the midst of this letter to Harbor Island._

An entire pine lay across the road, ripped up by the roots. Eleanor walked around to the trunk and then scrambled over: dirt and wet all down her front when she came away. _Witchety-witchety-witchety-tweeeeeeeeee_ , she heard, faintly. There came a chorus of them, most mornings; now, for the moment, it was just these few. Eleanor wondered where the little things had sheltered, that they hadn't got blown away. In some cranny of the tavern, no doubt. As the men had done. As Eleanor had done herself; as they had all used to do together, back when there had been more of them: a circle of children, with women ringing the edges of it; and the men had grumbled and swatted at them and sometimes given them sips of ale as the wind, near yet far away, sealed them into their envelope of safety. But the wind had taken the shutters, Eleanor thought, now. It had taken the south-east corner of the roof. There was nothing, after all, charmed about the tavern. And Eleanor wished, for a fierce moment, striding out onto the little rocky rise above Solomon's Cove, that it had ripped the entire place apart. That it had taken the roof off the study where Mr. Scott had sat penning his letter to her father, and the door off its hinges where he'd set up his pallet; and tumbled the tables about the heads of the men and the serving girls and all of them. All except that yellowthroat, and Eleanor herself. 

At the edge of the rise, Eleanor lay on her belly. She slid out to the top of the rocky outcropping overlooking the beach, and with a kind of dull, resentful triumph spotted at once the ship the men had meant: moored in deep water well out to the north-east. _Bullion_ , she heard again, in memory. _As soon as it's safe to sail_. And indeed: she could make out a boat, even now: a dark bobbing stain rowing heavily from shore to ship; and another, riding higher in the water, making its way back to the beach. 

It began to be truly day-break, as she lay there and looked. To the east the sun was fully over the horizon, and the sky lightened into a wash of pinks and greens. Even the section of the beach shaded by the cliffs she could make out now: men toting chests from the caves at the far end of the cove to the boats at the shoreline. The beach, on the whole, had weathered the storm well: other than some ripped-up branches of palm and pine, and the standard ocean spittings that got thrown up in every storm, the men had a clear path. In the midst of the bustling action, two figures stood stationary: the man small and stout; and by his side, a child: short trousers; rakish little tricorne. As Eleanor watched, a sailor came up to the man—the captain, then: _De Graaf is dead_ , he had said, and sent her away; Eleanor could spit—and leaned in to confer with him, pointing first to the boat at the shore-line, and then at the ship waiting off shore. The captain gestured in his turn, and the one who must be his quartermaster nodded; then strode off toward the water. 

The captain's gaze held on his boats until the child reached over and shook his shoulder. He looked down, then. The child made a kind of shrugging gesture toward... a bag, Eleanor saw. At their feet. The captain withdrew slightly, regarding the child; while the child stood unmoving, expectant, with its hand still touching him, lower down on his arm. That infant would follow him anywhere, Eleanor thought. Anywhere on Earth, if he would let it: and then the captain bent, and hoisted the bag. As he rummaged in it he turned, shoulders back, eyes and face and shoulders toward the ship so that he showed in profile to Eleanor; and Eleanor thought: could it—was that? Could it—?

She squinted. The captain was faced three-quarters away from her now, withdrawing from the long bag a small rapier—handle bestowed carefully in the hands of the child—and then, with less care, a full-size model with a large hand guard. The bag hit the sand. The captain threw one last glance back toward the ship and its attendant loading boats; but then turned, and seemed to come to a decision: chin tipped at the child, who stepped forward into the _en garde_ stance. The captain fell to laughing almost at once: head shaking, hand to hip. The child put its left hand to its hip. Eleanor watched as the captain gestured for the child to remove the tricorne, which fell to the sand; and the girl's black curls fell loose around her shoulders, and tumbled down her back. 

They were faced toward each other, now, perpendicular to Eleanor crouching behind her rock. All the men trod a path at an angle to her. She could approach, she thought, without being seen—but by the time she thought it, she was already levering herself around the little outcropping of rocks, and into the little ravine that wound down the hill. She scuffled, and slid, hair rising in whippy ropes to cut at her eyes. She thought of how they'd used to somersault down the gentler hills of the commons near the tavern: she, and Marie, and Mr. Scott's girl, and that little sprite from Havana who had stayed a month only and who yet had made Eleanor feel herself, however briefly, in love. They had raced each other down the hill: raced and tumbled. There had come a moment, always, when Eleanor's legs went out from under her; or if they held it was luck only, or the force of her motion carrying her along. She remembered it as if it were ages past: that day or week that was really just over a year ago: the four of them, tumbling arse over shoulders down the little hills. If they'd landed upright or not, with their knickers bared or not, it hadn't mattered: there'd been no one watching. That had seemed such a rare gift, at the time. 

Here, now, Eleanor came to rest behind a scrub bush under a pine at the edge of the beach. She was close enough to hear the two of them, now. Not every word, only every fourth or fifth, and that in French, but: her voice. The woman's voice. It was a _woman_ 's voice. Yet obeyed. Commanding; all the more so. Eleanor thought of the way the quartermaster had stood, a respectful foot distant from his captain, awaiting her pleasure. She thought of that whore, opening a coconut in the ruins of her house; and she thought of the boot of a Spanish soldier on the back of a yellow dress; and she thought of Marina, letting herself be pulled into the lap of Mr. Johanssen so that Eleanor, transformed of late and somehow visible, might dodge past the both of them to slip back beneath a table while Mr. Scott penned his letter in her father's old chamber, and the wind howled. 

The girl, hatless now, stood with her sword out and her hair tossing around her face. Her shoulder twisted back, her knee bent. They seemed about to fence; yet the captain relaxed her stance again, and laid her rapier in the sand. The girl in turn let her own sword down. Eleanor looked up the sand and down, for a man approaching to cause this distraction; but there was no one. Instead the captain strode around to the child's back. Eleanor could see the woman's long black braid hanging down the center of her man's coat. She said something to the girl, and the girl resumed her fencing posture; upon which the woman braced her front foot behind the girl's, and with her right hand reached under the girl's sword arm, while her left she laid on the girl's shoulder, and drew it back into line with her own.

She wasn't particularly tender about it. She didn't murmur anything in the girl's ear. She didn't linger. There was nothing—and yet. And yet. Eleanor's eyes stung, and overflowed. After a minute she had to open her mouth to breathe, curled in on herself behind a scrub bush on the sodden beach of Solomon's Cove.

A little way away the girl pulled her shoulder into line as her mother had showed her. The captain stepped back and away and around her side and again took up her rapier. In the tree above Eleanor's head, no bird called out; but she could hear the clack of metal on metal as the daughter danced back; forward; dodged; the mother landed a hit. The quartermaster came up again from the store, seeking counsel; but the woman, the captain, put up a hand to stay him until her daughter's sword had knicked the knee of her trousers. Only then did she stop and speak to him, gesturing toward the caves, a cant to her hips and her shoulders that spoke of practice; confidence; ease with her men. Eleanor in thrall, her face salt-wet, watched the woman clap a hand to the man's shoulder; as the girl, secure, patient, rapier loose in her grip, gazed out to sea.

**Author's Note:**

> Anne Dieu-le-Veut was the historical wife of Laurens de Graaf, and sailed with him and his pirate crew, of which—legend has it—she assumed command after his death in 1704. Their daughter, Marie Catherine, was born in 1694 and thus would have been 3-4 years younger than Eleanor: probably 9/10 to Eleanor's 13/14 when this story takes place. 
> 
> I'm not sure it's really visible in the final version, but the seeds of this storylet and its storm can be found in Zora Neale Hurston's _Dust Tracks on a Road_ and Eudora Welty's "The Winds." Both of which are recommended reading in general!


End file.
